We live in turbulent times, our distrust of institutions seemingly at a peak. Yet between January 1969 and the spring of 1970, according to the author of Fire and Rain, borrowing figures quoted by CBS News, radical groups set off an estimated 4,330 bombs across the United States, with the state of California contributing 20 a week. In New York, David Browne writes, "between August and October 1969, explosive devices had gone off in three buildings on Wall Street and in Macy's, followed by bombs at the Chase Manhattan Bank, the RCA building and General Motors in November". The following March the targets in midtown Manhattan included Mobil, ICM and General Telephone and Electronics.

Such statistics may supply a jolt even to the memories of those who lived through the era in question. But revolution certainly was in the air, the widespread grievances of Vietnam war and civil rights protesters taken to an extreme by the Weather Underground and other bodies, many of them less charismatic and not so easily defined, but each of great concern to Richard M Nixon and his notorious FBI chief, J Edgar Hoover. As the generalised euphoria of "the 60s" dissolved, something darker and more divisive took its place.

Fire and Rain examines the music of the period, specifically of the year 1970, and even more specifically of three groups and one solo singer: the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and James Taylor. If the book often seems like a set of discrete incidents in search of a unifying theory, and comes to no identifiable conclusion, there is no doubt that the chosen subjects shared a moment in which, thanks to the rock revolution of the 1960s, musicians were so lavishly feted and rewarded that they could challenge their industry to grant them a degree of autonomy impossible for their predecessors to imagine.

This was the mini-era in which the Beatles became four solo artists, in which cracks appeared under the surface of Simon and Garfunkel's image even while their recordings were achieving their greatest success, and in which David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash left the bands with which they had become famous – respectively the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and the Hollies – to form an early example of the genre known as the "supergroup", soon to be joined by another former member of Buffalo Springfield, Neil Young. "A year or two before, the concept was unimaginable," Browne writes. "Bands were collectives, united fronts, rarely if ever did a member spin off and make his or her own record on the side. Those who worked on their own, like [Bob] Dylan, had always done so and were continuing the long-standing tradition of the troubadour." The troubadour tradition would be renewed by James Taylor, the soulful junkie son of a professor of medicine whose gentle, lilting songs – including the one that gives the book its title – provided an early focal point for the 1970s singer-songwriter movement.

The author, a Rolling Stone contributing editor whose previous subjects include Sonic Youth and Tim and Jeff Buckley, dutifully retraces the relevant histories, stinting neither on the personal details of marriages and other relationships, the vast quantities of drugs ingested by most of the parties, and experiments with psychotherapy, nor on the social context (in which, for example, the killing of four Kent State students by National Guardsmen inspired Neil Young to write "Ohio", which became one of CSN&Y's biggest hits).

Although his research is reasonably diligent, he is not immune to small errors: Savile Row, the location of the office of Apple, the Beatles' company, is described as "a Piccadilly Square street"; Stills is said to have been fond of "Kruger" champagne; a monthly publication he refers to as the Beatles Book was surely the Beatles Monthly; and there is, or was, no such thing as a "skiffle beat". Given that he is capable of describing tracks from George Harrison's All Things Must Pass as "joyful cacophony", it is perhaps unsurprising that he has little of interest to say about the music itself. Occasionally, however, he hits the spot, as when discussing the underlying factors behind CSN&Y's eventual break-up: "By then, each man's songs and approach to music-making reflected their personalities: Nash's orderly and tidy, Crosby's laissez-faire and permissive, Young's sturdy and focused, Stills's nervy and headstrong."

He is also fond of modern turns of phrase that sit uncomfortably in a work aiming to evoke a particular historical period. Most conspicuously and irritatingly, his subjects are always "reaching out" to each other, by which he means "getting in touch", usually by telephone. Thus John Lennon "reaches out" to Ringo Starr, George Harrison "reached out" to Paul McCartney, agents "reach out" to promoters. At best, this seems an interesting example of how the vocabulary of psychotherapy has permeated public discourse in the four decades since John and Yoko paid their first visit to Arthur Janov for a course of primal screaming.

What Fire and Rain succeeded in doing, nonetheless, was to send me back to albums – CSN&Y's Déjà Vu, Taylor's Sweet Baby James, S&G's Bridge Over Troubled Water – that had lain undisturbed through half a lifetime. For all the instability and over-indulgence of the times in which they were produced, they turn out to have aged, in the main, surprisingly well.